Chapter 17 #3
The pull of it was different from any human mouth, from any witch, even from my sons when they had needed me long ago.
It felt like a tide exchanging, not taking.
She latched and drew, eyes closing, a low sound in her chest that did not frighten me because I understood it instantly—relief edged with animal fear.
I stroked her hair back with my free hand, held her head against me, and counted silently to keep myself honest. Five swallows.
Six. Seven. Her color returned—not flush, but certainty returning to skin.
“Enough,” I said softly. She did not stop.
I shifted my voice to the one that had made rooms of men fall to their knees. “Devon. Stop.”
She froze on the syllables as if her name were a hand on her shoulder.
She released my wrist and licked the last drop from the bite with a delicacy that nearly undid me again.
I pressed my thumb over the wound and sealed it with a thought and a smear of my tongue.
The flesh knit, clean and faintly tender.
Her eyes opened. Color had returned to her lips. The tremor had stilled. She looked dazed and lovely, robe-less, slick with us, hair tangled, eyes bright with apology and something like shame. I shook my head once to cut that last part off before it took root.
“No,” I said aloud. “There will be no shame in this room.”
She nodded like I had removed a weight from her chest. I lifted her carefully, easing free of her with a care I had not offered myself in a century, and set her on the sofa’s cool leather.
Her body made a small, contented sound I wanted to keep in a box.
I crossed to the armoire and pulled out two robes—mine, a dark charcoal silk lined with something softer; and one I had kept for guests who mattered, black with a subtle sheen.
I wrapped her in it first, lifting her arms, sliding the fabric over her shoulders.
Then I tied my own and fetched a glass of water from the sideboard.
Crystal clinked; the mundanity steadied the air.
She drank greedily, then slower. When she finished half, I took it, topped it, and handed it back. Her color improved while I watched, my relief as physical as any wound closing.
“What did you feel?” I asked finally, settling beside her, thigh to thigh. I did not turn the glass wall clear. This belonged only to us.
She tipped her head against the back of the sofa and looked at me from under her lashes.
“When you bit me,” she said, voice thoughtful, not fragile, “I felt like I was being…lit from the inside. It was—right. Too right. And then it kept going. I thought I could ride it. And I did. But afterward, it was like I had spent something I didn’t know was in a wallet, and when I reached for it again, there was nothing there.
” She lifted her hand; wiggled her fingers.
“Everything went floaty on the edges. I felt like if I didn’t take you back in, I would…
fade.” She frowned softly, searching. “Die isn’t the right word. Unmake.”
I absorbed that without comment for a moment. “And now?”
Her mouth quirked into a slow smile that had blood on it and light. “Now I feel like I could run to the river and back and then read three books while the coffee brews.”
I grunted, something like amusement and something not. “Good.” I brushed a thumb along her jaw, down her throat to where I had closed my mark moments before. The skin was smooth and unbroken, with a heat that had nothing to do with fever. “We will learn your limits together. And mine.”
She nodded once, solemn as an oath.
A thought pressed at my mouth. I did not speak it. I pressed it into the place I had heard her a few minutes ago and let it travel the new road I had not known we had built.
“Svetoch,” I thought in the voice I had heard was possible between the most blessed of fated mates. “Look at me.”
Her head snapped up. The glass in her hand sloshed, startled waves against the side. Her eyes widened, pupils suddenly huge. “Say that again,” she whispered, staring at my lips.
I did not move my mouth. I sent it again, slower. “Little light,” I said. “My light. Look at me.”
She did. Her breath stuttered. Her eyes filled—not with panic, but with the raw overflow of a truth she had denied and suddenly possessed in both hands.
“I heard you,” she said, awed, her voice breaking like a laugh that could not decide to be tears.
“I heard you without you saying anything. Inside.”
I nodded once. I did not smile because my face had not yet learned how to hold this kind of softness without breaking; but I let my hand curl around the back of her neck and rest there, the universal human gesture that says home even in languages that have forgotten the word.
“Good,” I said, and meant something larger.
“It is rare among any fated mates. It is the most coveted ability.” I exhaled.
“I did not know if celestials were among those who experienced this.”
She nodded fiercely, as if she would fight anyone who tried to steal so much as a thread of it. “It belongs only to us,” she echoed, the agreement setting its hooks in the world.
Then I heard her voice. “I love you. Please tell me you can hear me.”
I kissed her nose. “Yes, kiska. You are mine. I can hear you.”
Her sigh of relief was not small. “Thank fuck.” My mate was altogether holy and irreverent. And mine.
The hum of the club below drifted back into range—laughter, bass-line, the faint sweet sting of regulated venom.
The glass wall remained dark at my command.
The office held the light it had borrowed from us as an afterimage, patient and a little tender.
I watched her for another long minute, memorizing the way color came and went in her cheeks, the shape her mouth made when her thoughts turned inward, the exact weight of her against my side.
I had measured the world by debts and treaties for so long that I had forgotten the other arithmetic.
I spoke once more without speaking, because the urge to waste no time had taken me late and entirely.
“You will not die, I told her. Not while breath still bothers to visit my chest. Not while I own the right to say no to the dark.”
Her lashes lowered. The receiving of it looked like gratitude and a promise. “And you,” she said aloud, voice soft with mischief and steel, “will drink when I tell you. Because apparently I am dangerous to you in ways we still have to name.”
“Yes,” I said, and leaned in to kiss the corner of her mouth. “Command me.”
She laughed—a low, delighted thing that made the hairs on my arm rise for reasons that had nothing to do with threat.
I poured her more water. The night outside remembered its tasks.
Inside my office, I considered, briefly but completely, what it would mean to be a better man than I had been yesterday.
The answer sat beside me, warm and alive and bright enough to throw light on my old scars, and I decided I could endure it. I decided I would.